A Tennessee courtroom has sentenced a Memphis man who labored for a DVD and Blu-ray manufacturing and distribution firm to 57 months in jail for stealing and promoting digital copies of unreleased motion pictures.
37-year-old Steven R. Hale was charged in March with promoting ripped DVD and Blu-ray discs of flicks earlier than their launch. Prosecutors acknowledged on the time that Hale had stolen quite a few discs of flicks that had been being ready for industrial distribution in america between February 2021 and March 2022.
In Could 2025, Hale admitted to committing prison copyright infringement and agreed to completely compensate the victims, together with returning to his employer roughly 1,160 DVDs and Blu-rays that investigators had confiscated.
Hale, a convicted felon with earlier armed theft prices, additionally pleaded responsible to unlawfully possessing a firearm discovered with one spherical within the chamber and 13 within the journal.
“The copyright proprietor misplaced tens of tens of millions of {dollars} on account of Steven Hale stealing DVDs and Blu-rays of blockbuster motion pictures and promoting them earlier than their official scheduled launch dates,” mentioned FBI Particular Agent in Cost Joseph E. Carrico on Thursday.
Because the Justice Division revealed in March, Hale offered ripped variations of the stolen pre-release DVDs and Blu-rays by varied e-commerce websites.
The listing of stolen film discs contains “Godzilla v. Kong,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Dune,” “F9: The Quick Saga,” “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” and “Black Widow.”
He was additionally accused of ripping the pre-release “Spider-Man: No Means Dwelling” Blu-ray and sharing a digital copy extracted from it on-line, after bypassing the encryption stopping unauthorized copying.
“That digital copy was then illegally made out there over the web greater than a month earlier than the Blu-ray’s official scheduled launch date,” the Justice Division mentioned. “Copies of ‘Spider-Man: No Means Dwelling’ had been downloaded tens of tens of millions of occasions, with an estimated loss to the copyright proprietor of tens of tens of millions of {dollars}.”
In early March, prosecutors in New York charged two people employed by a third-party contractor for the StubHub on-line ticket market with profiting $635,000 from the resale of almost 1,000 stolen tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and varied different occasions, such because the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, Ed Sheeran concert events, Adele concert events, and a number of NBA video games.
Twenty-year-old Tyrone Rose and 31-year-old Shamara Simmons, each workers of Sutherland International Companies in Jamaica, had been detained in New York Metropolis and at the moment are dealing with a potential most penalty of as much as 15 years behind bars.
46% of environments had passwords cracked, almost doubling from 25% final yr.
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